The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz Podcast

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Renee Good. Alex Pretti. Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez. These are merely the murdered whose names we know, the ones they could not conceal or cover over. They are four, once-in-history, never-to-be-repeated human beings assassinated by empowered sociopaths who feel no accountability to the laws of this land or of any higher laws. And for each of these, there are thousands upon...

There’s a story we all tell ourselves about the kind of people we are. It’s a narrative we’ve spent a lifetime compiling. In those internal autobiographies, we all tell ourselves that we’re one of the good ones, that our presence on this planet is yielding something beautiful, something that will leave this place better than when we arrived. In those stories, we are the heroes, the helpers, the sa...

This sucks. There’s no way around it. Politically speaking, for those of us on the Left, losing a candidate who carried the Democrats’ hopes of finally unseating Susan Collins in Maine and shifting the balance of power in the Senate this late in the game and in this manner is devastating. There’s no spin here that can make this good news, at least not in the political arena. But from a human persp...

Hatred is a slow poison. Once it finds its way into the bloodstream, it gradually begins destroying a human being from the inside out. It does its work almost imperceptibly, driving out critical thinking, eradicating empathy, and hardening the heart. Since October 7, 1996, hundreds of millions of the people we love and live alongside have been hourly exposed to a corrosive, cancerous toxin that ha...

The steady stream of vitriol I receive from professed Christians who identify as MAGA is understandable. As they fire off threatening texts, furiously tap out expletive-laden emails, and break into violent, performative histrionics on social media, I genuinely feel for them. They’re often getting some really bad news that blows up the story they’ve spent a long time telling themselves and depend o...

Life is exhausting these days for lots of us, and I think I’ve figured out why. I think it’s having to sit through the pretending. You see, it’s bad enough watching over a third of our nation becoming fully indoctrinated into a sycophantic cult of personality of the very worst kind of person, to see once reasonable people abandon any semblance of benevolence toward diverse humanity. It’s rightly h...

I am a lifelong aspiring straight LGBTQ ally. For the past few decades, I’ve worked to be a good listener, to be willing to have my blind spots revealed, to be open to changing a deeply held assumption, to be willing to reckon with my profound privilege. My journey over this time has placed me in the path of millions of beautiful human beings who’ve shaped my understanding of sexuality up close an...

(Warning: this article contains depictions of sexual violence and may be triggering for survivors of assault) Donald Trump is a court-adjudicated rapist. This is not speculation. It is not conjecture. It’s not a Left-Wing talking point. This is documented, established fact. It was unequivocally declared by a judge. It has been repeatedly upheld in the courts. He is a rapist. And to any decent huma...

Supergirl opened this weekend to disastrous box office numbers, but its fate was sealed long before that, and it has very little to do with the quality of the film or the performance of its cast. The second offering in the James Gunn-curated DCU didn’t burn up on its entry into theaters. It was killed by a thousand Kryptonite darts in the weeks and months preceding, by an increasingly crowded YouT...

When the law fails the people, where do they go? When the highest court in a nation is compromised to the point that it disregards the law and becomes predatory toward its citizenry, what recourse does that citizenry have? What happens when the most powerful minority in a country weaponizes the very systems designed to protect its most vulnerable? America is about to find out. Despite his and his...

F*ck the fireworks and flip the flags. For actual patriotic Americans, this July 4th isn’t a party; it’s a funeral. There is nothing to celebrate here. We shouldn’t be singing right now; we should be grieving. We should be sitting vigil for the country we could have had but may never see. We should be mourning over how little independence has trickled down to the people in the streets. We should b...

We’ve seen this movie a few hundred times before. This green, murky, algae-besieged pool on the National Mall is simply the latest sequel to the grotesque and now predictable ten-year body of work from this arrogant, incompetent, prolific bed-shitter. The script is always the same: 1. Sense an encroaching political reckoning, be hounded by a damning news story that refuses to die, feel public supp...

You can tell a lot about people by the things that outrage them. As I write this, it’s Juneteenth, and all over America, from neighborhood social media sites all the way to Congress, profoundly bothered white people are engaged in wild histrionics over the fact that our nation acknowledges the event as a holiday. Of course, this anger is a confession of sorts. It’s also an ironic and sad reminder...

Dear Former President Barack Obama and Former First Lady Michelle Obama, History has a way of revealing the truth, eventually. Like the sun gradually coming up over the horizon and burning away the darkness concealing everything around it, the unfolding years chase away the noisy bombast of social media rhetoric, knee-jerk think pieces, and in-the-moment emotion, leaving us with the unvarnished re...

At the close of the Trump Administration’s garish, bloated, masturbatory performance art on the White House lawn, UFC fighter Josh Hokit proceeded to punctuate his match by offering a monstrous verbal assault on former First Lady Michelle Obama, targeting her gender. His head wrapped in an American flag and flanked by Joe Rogan, the bottom-feeding patron saint for mediocre white men who’ve failed...

What in the white trash hell was that? How did we get here? I’m not talking about the perfect storm of corruption, toxic religion, and white nationalism that has resulted in the unthinkable ascension to power of one of the most reprehensible, festering sacks of organic matter to ever leave his putrid slime trails on the planet. Greater minds can unpack the complex historical and social explanation...

Growing up, I was taught that knowledge was power. Lately, I’m beginning to believe differently. On many days, I think it’s hazardous. Right now, knowing is actually part of the problem. We’re all suffering from information poisoning. The more we know about what’s really happening in this country: the depths of our fractures, the audacity of our leaders, and the failing of our systems the greater...

Hey, New York Knicks Fans, I know you’re waking up today disappointed that you won’t get the sweep you were hoping for, that you’ll need to postpone your long-delayed celebration at least a few more days. I realize this wasn’t the script you’d written in your head for Game 3, and this morning you’re probably not in the mood to hear about moral victories. Still, I need you to hear something: the ga...

Hey, America. I get it: this feels like it’s never going to end, like this oppressive darkness will never lift, like the disorienting chaos of these days is now our default setting. This is understandable. For the last decade, we’ve been living in dog years, friends; pummeled by a century’s worth of Constitutional crises, systemic failures, war crimes, and human moral collapses. The atrocities hav...

Well, it’s Pride Month, and once again this year, my timeline is filled with performative, pearl-clutching, straight, professed Christians, outraged at the supposed rainbow-bedazzled queer assault on the institution of marriage. This year, they’re even trying to meme-manifest a “Nuclear Family Month,” which is about as asinine an idea as advocating for “White History Month” every February. Of all...

I’ve been trying to place the heaviness within me these days; the nagging sickness that resides in the pit of my stomach every morning, regardless of what I do to try and push it away. It isn’t merely the growing nihilism that comes from realizing how quickly the bedrock of our Republic is dissolving. It isn’t just the black despair from watching the rapid and seemingly inexorable erosion of human...

June is Pride Month, and straight people who consider themselves allies to our queer neighbors need to understand the implications for us in this iteration of America. Yes, allyship is about rainbow flags, social media posts, and parade events, but it’s about a hell of a lot more than that. To be a true LGBTQ ally right now means visibly and forcefully pushing back against the quickly metastasizin...

As someone whose life’s work is words, I confess that I’m increasingly at a loss for them. And even in the moments when the words do come, they almost immediately feel obsolete. It’s become nearly impossible to wake up and comment on any specific human rights atrocity, any precise illegality, any single bastardization of the Christian faith, any individual act of Congressional malpractice. In the...

AI is inevitable. Well, at least, we're certainly being led to believe it is. The message is everywhere right now. It’s coming from tone-deaf University commencement addresses,from soulless techbro vampire startups,from morally bankrupt data center builders, from myopic local politicians,from woefully lazy journalists,and from massive organizations that have gutted their creative departments. They...

Picture someone you love who died serving this nation, or even someone you’ve never met. Imagine them wherever they took their final breath on this planet: Jumping into churning, frozen foreign seas in a screaming storm of artillery fire. Shivering in a filthy trench in the terrifying blackness of an insect-blanketed jungle floor. Leaping from a fire-engulfed plane into a disorienting maelstrom of...